So my husband and I are always saying to each other, "You know what I learned today?" I say it more often because I have more time on my hands and I'm a voracious researcher, but one of the best parts of the day is when he comes home from work and one or both of us goes "Guess what I learned about today?"

I think it's especially important when you do creative work to have the kind of curiosity that's killing you just like a cat would be killed by the curiosity, yea. It's crucial that you have an interest in things beyond the usual scope of mainstream nerdery or you'll end up as someone who only makes things in the same vein as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings and fuck if we ain't got enough of that, amirite?

So, in this thread, tell us about something you learned today (or in the past; we'll never know you learned it three years ago). Feel free to post in a fun fact format or a whole Google deep-dive. If you end up motivated by someone else's post in here, bring whatever other info you find to show and tell.

Today I learned that a group of hackers who managed to find a devkit version of the Xbox 360 were able to, from just that piece of hardware, hack into pretty much every major videogame company's internal server and play their unreleased games for years.

Today I learned that Chairman Mao started a famine in China because he thought sparrows were eating all the crops. He told everyone to kill sparrows and then locusts ate all their crops instead and millions of people died of starvation.

Well, I didn't make my first post on this page about lindy-hopping being called Savoying or whatever, but the fact i did just dig up... hoo boy is it a doozy.

So, today I learned that the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas had their own children's TV show with 21 episodes from 2007-2009 known as "Tomorrow's Pioneers". On it, children were taught things like antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and Islamism [or "Islamism as only terrorist fuckwits see it, not actual Islamism]. Also, one of it's host characters was a shameless ripoff of Mickey Mouse known as "Farfour The Mouse".

We could maybe use some info on lindy-hop 'cause this is rapidly turning into the Fucked-Up Shit Thread. Unfortunately, though, I know about a lot of fucked up shit and your post reminded me of this example:

The Family International - formerly known as Teens for Christ and then The Children of God - is a cult that produced a children's video series called Treasure Attic. It was a Christian-oriented sing-along show with puppets. It's arguably most famous now for this episode due to this gif that originates from it:

Based on the little bit of the show that I've watched, I don't think Treasure Attic itself was sinister or contained any indoctrination messages (you know, aside from regular Christianity stuff which is generally benign) but I only watched that one episode so.

The cult itself has a lot of wild-ass sex practices though. The most notorious is the sexual relationship you're supposed to have with Jesus (basically just imagining he's fucking you when you're having sex or masturbating (and if you're a dude, you're supposed to imagine you're a woman during this)). They also used the age old trick of having the female members lure guys in with sex, but they coined the term Flirty Fishing for it. They're also subject to allegations of sexual abuse of minors 'cause of course they are.

So today I was tellin' my artist about a new character's design and part of that description involved an exchange that happened on Project Runway once. It was an end-of-season reunion special and at those, people could email in questions for the designers and the judges. And someone asked Michael Kors why he always wear the same all-black outfit every day.

Today I learned that it's actually quite common among fashion designers to create a uniform for themselves. Tom Ford, the late Karl Lagerfeld, Vera Wang, and a bunch of others all do it too.

Kors' explanation for it was that if he doesn't have to think about his own wardrobe, he can instead use that energy to think about how he dresses others.